1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an automatic music composing apparatus capable of composing a musical piece by using musical templates which are selected based on given conditions for musical composition, and also relates to a computer readable medium containing programs to be executed by a computer system to configure the computer system to provide such an automatic music composing apparatus as mentioned above.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Various types of automatic music composing apparatuses have been heretofore proposed and placed in actual use for alleviating the burdens on music composers. As an exemplary type of such automatic music composing apparatuses, the same inventors proposed an automatic melody generating apparatus which are capable of generating melodies based on musical templates as disclosed in the specification and the drawings of Japanese Patent Application No. 8-132208, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference. Although the invention disclosed in the above-mentioned Japanese Patent Application No. 8-132208 (the Prior Application) was proposed prior to the present invention, the Prior Application has been deemed withdrawn, after another Japanese patent application (the Later Application) was filed claiming a priority based on the Prior Application, the Later Application being given an application No. 9-137153 and being published (unexamined) on Feb. 20, 1998 under a publication No. 10-49154 not constituting a published prior art to the present invention. But the description of the Later Application is also incorporated herein by reference. With that automatic melody generating apparatus, the user inputs composition conditions, then the apparatus searches a plurality of pre-stored musical templates for a candidate template or templates which meet(s) the inputted composition conditions to extract the found candidate or candidates for the user's further working. The user will then select one of the candidate templates, and may adopt the selected one as it is or may modify the same as desired, and then will work on the template to create a desired melody piece from the apparatus.
A musical template, as used herein and in the above-mentioned Japanese Patent Application, means a set of data defining a piece of music or skeleton therefor in the form of a succession of segments (i.e. a piece of music is partitioned into segments), each segment carrying musical parameters to determine musical properties of the segment such as a melody segment, a chord progression segment, the sentence similarity symbol of the segment, a feature or character of the segment and the structure of a musical piece. The segments are structured in a hierarchical architecture such that the highest level is an overall structure of a whole musical piece, the second level is musical sentences, the third level is musical phrases, the fourth level is musical measures, and so forth. Namely, a musical piece is comprised of sentences, each sentence is comprised of phrases, and each phrase is comprised of measures. The simplest template may include the structure (sentence, phrase, measure) of a musical piece, a melody skeleton (a basic idea of a melody sample) and similarity symbols for sentences. The whole melody is partitioned into sentences, each sentence is further partitioned into phrases, each phrase into measures, and each measure includes a note or notes having respective pitches and durations aligned in a progression having a rhythm pattern to constitute a melody segment.
In the automatic melody generating apparatus mentioned above, the composition conditions set by the user include, for an overall musical piece, the meter, the genre (e.g. eight-beat), the mode (major/minor), the melody flow (melodic/rhythmic, i.e. fluent/pulsating), the tempo, the pitch range, the minimum note length, the number of sentences, etc.; and for an individual musical sentence, the number of phrases, the similarity symbol for each sentence, the head and tail chords in the sentence, etc.; and for an individual phrase, the number of measures, etc.; and for an individual measure, the number of syllables (beatings, pulsations), etc. For a musical piece without words, the number of the syllables may not be defined in the conditions.
In the case of the conventional automatic music composing apparatus using musical templates, however, if there is no hit in the search for a template having the identical conditions to the inputted composition conditions, the search should be repeated with some of the conditions omitted to conduct a less strict search. Further, for example, in case the inputted conditions include the sequence of phrase symbols of A-B-A'-B', a template having the phrase symbol sequence of A-B-A-B' cannot be a candidate, which means the number of the candidates selected through the search will inevitably be small. In this context, the mark &lt;'&gt; included in the symbol denotes the similarity (being not identical but similar to a certain degree in terms of melody or other musical properties). Namely, the sentence symbol &lt;A'&gt; is given to a sentence which is melodically (or from some other properties) similar to the sentence to which is given the sentence symbol &lt;A&gt;.
Anyway, where there are only a few candidates obtained as a result of the search, a musical piece that can be generated lacks variety, whichever candidate should be selected. This would lead to narrow freedom in composing musical pieces. The user, of course, composes a musical piece without using templates, but if so, the user cannot enjoy the advantage (efficiency in composition) of using an automatic music composing apparatus.